Nasdaq’s product design team was tasked with designing a mobile companion for their existing desktop investor relations platform. IROs and other financial executives use our product to target investors, track industry financials, and monitor analyst reports. These data sets are critical to our customers and help them understand the financial health of their company and what level of investment they will potentially receive from investment firms. Many of these executives travel frequently and rely on up-to-date data in order to adequately perform their tasks. The content we serve is complex and therefore must be served in a simplified way. Our customers travel frequently and need to access their investment program from anywhere. Investor meetings are a significant part of our customer’s job so we made sure they could access broker profiles, meeting notes, and location information easily. We created a dashboard with summaries of their stock financial data, research, industry news, and upcoming events. This gives our customers a central location from which they can monitor everything and quickly view up-to-date information. From here they can dive deeper into research, event transcripts, and more. We also knew it would be critical for us to provide a connection between our desktop and mobile platforms. Our team devised methods of sharing analyst profiles with a team member’s mobile device, syncing reports locally for offline access, and flagging items to follow-up with or read later. We relied heavily on research and customer interviews throughout our design process. Our team performed extensive research with customers early on so that we could understand their processes and how they approached daily tasks. As we sketched and worked through IA and UX we made sure to include feedback from product owners, internal sales teams, and additional customers. Just as we used research in the beginning to learn our customers’ behavior, we also performed usability testing near the end of our design process to reaffirm decisions we had made and fine-tune areas that still needed additional work.

Our team operates in an industry which has undervalued design, up until recently. We've worked to build an extensive team of designers who understand user experience principals and design based on research and cognitive reasoning. This project was user led from start to finish. We conducted dozens of interviews and several hours of usability testing to ensure our product was easy to use and created a significant benefit for our customers. Our goal was to provide a mobile tool that makes our customers' lives and daily tasks easier and I believe we were able to accomplish this. The initial version of our product was launched in late-April and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. To quote one of our customers, "First thing in the morning, I can guarantee that when I have my coffee in the morning that this is what I'm going to open up."